[idea] Plans and air/sky transport

[Rose]

Such a tank is actually quite realistic in a way that probably a zombie dog can chew its way through the hull if given enough time. As for a blimp base, we’re talking about Graf Zeppelin sized airships. Those guys are going to need massive masts, since fierce winds exert high forced upon the tied ships.

[Rose]

Picture related. Lower masts are possible, but are still massive.

[crazykiddeath]

Why do you assume it has to be so big? you can make a mobile base as small as 5x4 if you don’t feel the need for too much cargo space.

edit: that’s totally enclosed too

edit 2: that would give you 2x3 or 6 spaces for internals so you can actually go smaller or give yourself a space in back that lets you hide from view and have a small cab to drive from.

[TheMurderUnicorn]

Bah, I don’t know. Erased some negative comment I left. It would be neat to be in game, and my questioning the realism of a survivor learning to pilot/build an aircraft really cuts down on the fun aspect.

I think they’re probably implementable right now, but I suspect it would be a large project.

[mlangsdorf]

Please submit the necessary changes to the vehicle code to enable this:

• vehicle parts for gas bags, wings, propellers, and jet engines
• code to calculate static and aerodynamic lift and to allow the player to use the ‘<’ and ‘>’ keys to ascend and descend their vehicle when combined lift is greater than vehicle weight.
• modifications of the air drag code to account for gas bags, wings, etc.

I don’t think at this time it’s necessary to model angle-of-attack in the lift calculations.

I recommend starting with tethered hot air balloons since the math is a lot easier and it would be a good proof of concept.

Please ping me on the discord if you have any implementation questions. I’ll help you debug as I have time but I don’t have time to write this myself.

[Trigon]

Now if I can burn my house down by smoking in bed then will I be able to turn the better part of the tri-state area into a fireball by smoking on a blimp?

[crazykiddeath]

Depends on if you use hydrogen or helium I guess.

[Ragno]

this would be a good way to avoid those forests >.>

[Mr.Denton]

And would allow for having bases in many differcent places

[Hof1993]

Would this require a new pilot skill or use the driving skill.

[Mr.Denton]

Driving, something like 8-10, any less and you would risk crashing, depending on the type.

[draghi]

vehicles like these seem really tall, how would that work if vehicles cand only span one single Z-level? shouldn’t that be implemented as well?

[mlangsdorf]

It would nice if vehicles spanned multiple z-levels, and at some point I’m going to make that happen. It would be great if someone else did the work first, though.

[dpwb]

Currently I believe Kevin said that z-levels only go up 10 levels.
If you have a hot air balloon thats 3 z-levels tall, it could only go up a few more.
Hardly seems worth it, the overmap sight radius boost you’d get from going up z-levels would be awesome if you could go up say… 50 z-levels and drift with the wind to get to a new area.
I think I recall a conversation with Kevin where he said extending the z-level limit was a bit gnarly but do-able…

[Mr.Denton]

Well i personally dont see a reason why one vehicle or plane should be sevearl z levels, seems to just be a hassle, tho it would be very nice to have a drinving fort or 2 storage plane, can the engine handle it?

[mlangsdorf]

The engine can’t handle it currently, because:

• vehicle local positions are stored as points of x,y instead of tripoints of x,y,z
• the vehicle interaction menu doesn’t know how to display and transition between a vehicle’s 0 z-level and a vehicle’s +1 z-level
• it’s possible that there would be weird map interactions when displacing something that it on 2 different z-levels; it should just work but obviously it hasn’t been tested

The first issue is relatively straightforward to fix: change the points to tripoints throughout the vehicle code, add some logic to calculate part neighbors on the Z axis.

The second issue is a UI problem. After you know how the display should look and the buttons should be pressed, hooking them together should be trivial.

The third issue requires a fair bit of bugtesting.

I’m not saying this is a good first issue, but multi z-level vehicles requires less knowledge than the vehicle speed overhaul or amphibious vehicles did, though probably more playtesting. I could do it or help an intermediate CDDA programmer do it, but I’m busy doing other things.

[Mr.Denton]

Mlang I was thinking, some of you guys who do a majority of modding are doing so according to your free time and choose:

Would you guys put in, and implant certain feature, in a given amount of time, all of this given content, if there was payment?

What if we as a community came to an agreement on a number of goals, done within a certain time frame, for a set amount of money, funded through “go fund me”

If the money would not be raised successfully, all money would be returned, there could also be extra prizes for giving extra, like special colours or tags in this discourse, or having your name in the credits, etc.

I think a lot of people would be willing to pay for seeing a push for common desired goals, if all active members gave something like 15-25 dollars each, we could accumulate a bit.

[mlangsdorf]

I’m doing this as a hobby, which in part means I choose what to develop and when.

If you want me to do this semi-professionally so that you can tell me what to develop and when, you can’t afford my rates. Even a quick and easy feature takes 4+ hours, which burns through 30 $15 donations. Something like vehicle z-levels is 30+ hours of work.

[Mr.Denton]

Well if your rates i 112.5 $ per hour, and we would want a team of modders, it would go complety over the price we could collect as a community

But anyway thanks for all the great contributions you bring free of charge

[kevin.granade]

This is why community funding of the project has never been brought up as a serious option, you can’t afford us.
What you CAN do is visit https://www.bountysource.com/teams/cataclysm-dda/issues?tracker_ids=146201 and post bounties for specific issues. Keeping in mind I’m not going to merge something just because it has a bounty, so make sure it’s something that fits in the game before backing it.

Back on topic, if vehicles move outside the current reality bubble, it would be not at all hard to just switch the display over to the 'm’ap menu for large-scale navigation.